New introduction to Meister Eckhart by Dietmar Mieth published

Dietmar Mieth
Meister Eckhart: An Introduction
(Series: Eckhart: Texts and Studies, Volume 17)
Peeters Publishers, Leuven 2025
ISBN: 9789042950665
e-ISBN: 9789042950672
277 pages
85 EUR

This introduction is the result of decades of research on Meister Eckhart, beginning with an interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation on the contemplative and active life in Eckhart's German sermons (1968, revised 2018). The author, Dietmar Mieth, long-time head of the Meister Eckhart Research Centre at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt, translated a compendium of Eckhart's sermons into modern German (1979, last edition 2025) and published numerous articles on Eckhart's spiritual teachings with a particular interest in ethical implications: Virtues, social behaviour and human dignity.

This book provides information on Eckhart's practical metaphysics: (1) his general teaching on creation, God's timeless activity, the relationship between God and man through processes of knowledge, grace, justice, and freedom; (2) his thinking on unity in word choice, intellectual knowledge, and the use of images that are self-correcting; (3) his combination of revelation in his biblical commentaries with abstraction, wisdom and doctrine of life; (4) his doctrine of becoming a 'son' of God through the birth of God in the human soul; (5) the important inter-confessional and inter-religious implications of mystical immediacy in his teaching; and (6) Eckhart's defence against some dogmatic objections to his vernacular teaching.

"This book provides a fundamental and comprehensive scholarly introduction to Meister Eckhart, with insights into his significance today," says Markus Vinzent, head of the Meister Eckhart Research Centre at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of the University of Erfurt.

A German version of the book is available as "Meister Eckhart", published by Beck publishing house in 2014.